books.google.com - New York Times Bestseller: The “miraculous” memoir of an inspiring teacher and the students who changed his life on an impoverished South Carolina island (Newsweek). Though the children of Yamacraw Island live less than two miles from the southern mainland, they can’t name the US president or...https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Water_Is_Wide.html?id=B45WFbdvvlAC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareThe Water Is Wide

The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

New York Times Bestseller: The “miraculous” memoir of an inspiring teacher and the students who changed his life on an impoverished South Carolina island (Newsweek).

Though the children of Yamacraw Island live less than two miles from the southern mainland, they can’t name the US president or the ocean that surrounds them. Most can’t read or write. Many of the students are the descendants of slaves, handicapped by poverty and isolation.

When Pat Conroy arrives, an eager young teacher at the height of the civil rights movement, he finds a community still bound by the bitter effects of racism, but he is determined to broaden its members’ horizons and give them a voice.

In this poignant memoir, which Newsweek called “an experience of joy,” the New York Times–bestselling author of The Prince of Tides plumbs his experiences as a young teacher on an isolated South Carolina island to reveal the shocking inequalities of the American education system.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review - bness2 - LibraryThing

This is a very open and candid memoir of the year (and part of a second year) that Pat Conroy spent teaching that the all black two-room grade school on Yamacraw Island, South Carolina. After teaching ...Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review - krazy4katz - LibraryThing

A beautifully written book about Pat Conway's year teaching school on a small island off the coast of South Carolina where children from a former slave population have grown up isolated from the ...Read full review

About the author (2010)

Pat Conroy was the New York Times–bestselling author of two memoirs and seven novels, including The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, and The Lords of Discipline. Born the eldest of seven children in a rigidly disciplined military household, he attended the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. He briefly became a schoolteacher (which he chronicled in his memoir The Water Is Wide) before publishing his first novel, The Boo. Conroy passed away in 2016 at the age of seventy.